Magic: The Gathering
Magic: The Gathering is a collectible card game published by Wizards of the Coast, the current owners of the Dungeons & Dragons franchise. It was the first truly successful collectible card game and remains popular to this day. Note that this page is just a general overview. If you want more in-depth information, MTGSalvation has a very nice wiki. ''Magic'' Storyline It exists. Magic didn't always have a storyline. The first set to tell an original story was the second expansion, Antiquities. It introduced Urza Planeswalker and the corruption of the Phyrexians. It is generally considered the beginning of Magic canon, introducing characters, locations, and themes that would be revisited to this day. With a few exceptions, the early Magic storylines revolved around the hub-world of Dominaria, the "nexus of the Multiverse." While at first largely episodic, the stories began to converge during the long, involved plotline known as the Weatherlight Saga. The Weatherlight Saga was the story of the crew of the Weatherlight, an airship that could travel between planes. Ultimately, the story was about the crew trying to assemble the Legacy Weapon, a Wave Motion Gun made of plot coupons scattered across the multiverse. This was done at the behest of Urza Planeswalker, who needed the completed weapon to defeat his arch-nemesis, Yawgmoth of Phyrexia. Yawgmoth, meanwhile, was building forces with which to invade Dominaria, since he wanted to rule the Nexus of the Multiverse and at the same time get even for his banishment from there umpty-ump thousand years before. As drama demands, all these events converged in the Invasion block, with Phyrexia invading, main characters dying, and the good guys winning at a terrible cost. The Weatherlight Saga is well-liked in retrospect, but most people agree that it was a drag at the time. Since then, Magic has moved away from long story arcs in favor of a more episodic one-story-per-block format. This change has been helped by the fact that the story moves to a new plane with each block, instead of staying focused on Dominaria. ''Magic'' Locations Given that Magic is explicitly set in a multiverse, and the framing device for the game relies on multiple planes and the ability to travel between them, there's no shortage of disparate places in the MTG universe. Note, however, that this universe's restrictive rules on interplanar travel makes traveling to, from, and within the MTG multiverse more difficult than normal. Portals are known to open extremely slowly, even though having a Planeswalker operate the RA annihilates that effect. Warning: Kidnapping a Planeswalker is considered a Very Bad Idea. Dominaria The Nexus of the Multiverse. Dominaria has a surface area 2.5 times that of Earth (with no corresponding increase in gravity, for some reason) and has a ton of continents, all with a different flavor. Uniquely, it also has naturally occurring static portals to other worlds. Rabiah An Arabian Nights-themed world. Notable for having 1,000 variations of itself. Phyrexia A plane powered by black mana. It consisted of nine concentric spheres and was clearly modeled on Dante's notion of hell. It was Yawgmoth's seat of power for thousands of years, but was destroyed at the end of the Weatherlight Saga. Rath An artificial plane created by Yawgmoth as part of his plan for the invasion of Dominaria. It also no longer exists, having been overlaid onto Dominaria (and thus merging with it) during the Invasion. Mirrodin/New Phyrexia A metal plane created by the Planeswalker Karn. Notable for several reasons: it has five suns (one for each color of mana) and is so pervasively metallic that almost all lifeforms (including humans) are all or part metal. It was recently conquered and reforged as New Phyrexia. Ravnica The city-plane that was the setting of the fan-favorite Ravnica block (recently revisited). Notable for being much more highly urbanized than most fantasy settings, and the distinctive "guild" system. Innistrad A dark and gloomy plane where vampires, zombies and werewolves prey on the native humans, who are in turn protected by the archangel Avacyn (secretly a creation of vampire Planeswalker Sorin Markov). Heavily themed around gothic horror. Alara A plane formerly split into five demi-planes, each missing two colours of mana, Alara was recently reunited in a near-cataclysmic event called the Conflux. Lorwyn/Shadowmoor A bucolic pastoral world inhabited by goblins, giants, faeries, and other fairytale creatures. Up until recently, every century or so Lorwyn underwent the "Great Aurora," where the plane would transform into a dark reflection of itself known as Shadowmoor. This was fixed with the defeat of Oona, Queen of the Fae. Kamigawa A Japanese-inspired plane that once hosted a war between the kami (spirits) and the mortal inhabitants. The war ended with the defeat of Konda, a warlord who had abducted a spirit. Zendikar A largely untamed "adventure world" whose landscape constantly heaves and shifts in a process called the Roil. Zendikar served as a prison for the Eldrazi, aberrant extraplanar creatures which fed on the energy of entire planes, until their recent release by a group of unwitting Planeswalkers. Theros A Greek mythology-inspired plane, home to a pantheon of five major gods (one for each color of mana) and ten minor gods (one for each color pair), their worshippers, and the monsters currently preying on them. These deities and their servitors have the distinction of being "Enchantment Creatures." Tarkir An East Asian-inspired plane, primarily based on the Mongol Empire. It is split into two separate timelines: one where five clans (one for each of five three-color groups) vie for supremacy amongst one another after the extinction of dragons, and one where these same five clans are overtaken by the ever-increasing swarms of dragons from five two-color broods, their original ways of life lost. ''Magic'' and the PPC The Magic universe doesn't usually show up on the PPC's radar for a number of reasons. First, the overlap of "people who write fanfiction" and "people who play Magic" is actually quite small. Second, Magic settings tend to be very broad, meaning that unless the fanfic contradicts a very small band of canon, it's not chargeable; "Fanbrat X discovers that she's a Planeswalker," while generally stupid and badly written, is not totally implausible within the rules of this universe. Third, the Magic canon is very resilient to damage, being quite meta. This is a universe that has featured, in-canon: an alternate universe, a Mary Sue, an apocalypse caused by having so many other apocalypses, and a continuity editor. Headquarters itself contains a shop dedicated to selling Magic cards to agents. It is run by Julien and Greg, and can be found here. Minis The minis of the Magic: The Gathering unimultiverse are mini-atogs. They tend to be prolific eaters of whatever the Ironic Overpower deemed fitting. Agents Native to Magic * Agent Kirill * the Vinelasher Kudzu Missions in this Continuum All reports are listed alphabetically by agent name, in the case of agents with multiple missions, or by mission name. * Agents Kirill and Zug (DF) ** "Darkness Our Bride," Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 ** "Easing one's mind," Part 1, Part 2, with Intern Cy * "Not THAT Kind of Magic" (crossover with Harry Potter), Agents Natasha and Sylvia (DF) with Agents Priyala and Saline (DF) Category:Continua Category:Tabletop Games